Hey Kidlings,
Commodore 64 here with a quick how to in photoshop. Have you ever downloaded an image you’d like to use on your website but it was sandwiched on top of some ghastly color which totally doesnt fit with your “flow”? Well here is a quick, no-frills, way to a transparent image that you can set to a background of your choosing.

First we start with simple image of a leaf:Double click the “Background” and then hit enter when the dialog pops up. You should now have a transparency capable layer which is ready to have it’s fat trimmed, the layer name should change from “Background” to “Layer 0″:We then take out our trusty magic wand tool and select the white around the leaf by clicking the white part around the leaf. In this cased I’ve used a tolerance of 80 to produce a decent result. You can play around with the tolerance depending on the image you choose to work with to get the selection border where you need it. In this case, our subject image has a dark shadow. Our tolerance of 80 has allowed the selection form to come in closer to the leaf, eliminating most of the shadow from the inside of the selection border as shown in the following image:Hit delete to produce the following:

At this point you have a choice of filling in your own background color, in photoshop and saving for web as a jpeg, or you can save for web as a transparent gif and apply matting in the intended target’s background color of your choice. In the following example I want to put the leaf on a blue background on my intended destination for this graphic. I do this buy removing the selection I already have by clicking anywhere in the work window with a marquee tool, or pressing ctrl-D for “deselect.” I then go to File menu, Save For Web and save with the following options:

Hit the save button, name your file and give it a home. That’s It. Now this isnt the most professional or precise way of doing this, but if you need a quick easy design flow control with image backgrounds, this is the 5-step, 5-minute move to get you on your way.

Enjoy!
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)

I just came across this in my daily browsing and had a pretty good laugh over it. Finally something Mac and Window users can team up against! LMFAO – don’t worry no actual Linux users were hurt in this clip…

[Via AnythingUnderTheBlanket From DuelingAnalogs]

So got any other funny pictures or tech humor to share with your fellow admins? Email em on over to tips at askTheAdmin.com and some of our trained monkeys will peruse them for whats actually funny. Yes believe it or not monkeys tend to agree with what we find funny… Am I kidding? Who knows… Scary isn’t it?

_TheDontKillThePenguinAdmiN_

Happy Holidays to AskTheAdmin readers celebrating this holly jolly time of the year. Sorry about the re-run guys we will be back with fresh content tomorrow… So stay tuned.

This must be what a real Microsoft fan boy dreams about…

How long before Billy Gates and his winged henchmen send a cease and desist letter?? Hope everyone is having a great holiday! Personally I love extra days off with the fam – back to work tomorrow.

And btw I am seriously considering copping a Mac Book Pro to replace my main machine. all these mac certs must be going to my head.

what did everyone get for the holidays? Anyone out there?

_TheMerryOleAdmiN_

All that little Georgie, from BeingFive.com, heard was that The Admin is a Microsoft Certified Admin taking questions. He wants to know if we have ever met Bill Gates.

Yes we have meet Bill Gates and In all fairness we do say we answer ANY technical related questions. So our answer would have to be YES, lots of money falls out of Billy Gates pants into his couch. But, said couch is protected by Microsoft firewall so you can’t get at it (Or Can You?).

We think Billy Gates SHOULD buy Georgie a Pony! What do you think? He is after all into the whole philanthropy thing isn’t he?

Thanks for asking us a question George! We hope you will stop by again after all we are baby crazy now. (And no we are not calling you a baby, George. We just like kids all of a sudden – go figure!

_TheCartoonedAdmiN_

Make sure you check out Georgies antics at his very own website – BeingFive.com. The premise is George is a five year old that blogs using voice recognition software and a microphone. We syndicate his newest toon’s at the bottom of EVERY AskTheAdmin.com page.

The Admin and Commodore 64 attended the CES International 2008 Press Preview last night. We were on a mission to find new gizmos and gadgets for our upcoming post

“It’s A Geeky Christmas! What to get the geek in your life for the holidays.”

We searched high and low (mostly near the fancy finger foods and at the bar ) then we hit the exhibits. Somehow we wound up with an Exhibitor pass instead of the standard press pass… I started to wait in line to get it all fixed up but then the security guard told me i can go right into the show floor – which was not going to be open for another half hour. Sweet! No line at the bar… No line for food. And no lines at the booths! Super Sweet.

We found a few really cool stocking stuffers and some great low and high end gifts. Some brand new technology and some re-vamped old ones. Check out the highlights:

• A Gold and Fake Snake Skin Motorola Razr V8

• The Dragon is a premium class-1 Bluetooth headset with 100-meter range and dual-mic noise suppression, designed for all-day usage and top performance. It can be used as a two way radio as well. The octopus looking usb hub was cool as well from CallPod.

• AtA’s first hands on with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). I was told we can buy them individually but no one could tell me how. If I was Fidel Castro they would have told me! AMD showed us this little guy along with some other very cool stuff.

• Parrot’s Hands Free Car Kit from the Awesome hands of Philips

• A helmet cam

• A Blinged Out Hello Kitty Laptop? Kind of hurts a little eh? AMD had it on display next to some of their fabulous new itty bitty chips that bring ATI graphics to phones and other small platforms.

We also came across some amazing new takes on Wireless USB from WiQuest, RCA is helping old people that don’t know that their old analog TV’s will stop working in 2012 by offering a converter, Alpines Mobile Media Solution – these things keep getting smaller and smaller! I played with some Solid State Drives from SanDisk, Audio Vox has some awesome (Cheap) two way radios and Turbo Charge had really cheap portable chargers for almost every possible mobile device.

Review units will be coming in shortly and we are hard at work compiling our Geeky List for our readers (and their significant others). If you have something you want to submit or just share with us please drop a email to tips at askTheAdmin.com and we will check everything out!

So what do you want for the holidays? Let us know – or if you don’t know what you want send that close someone over to AtA in December for a list of “AtA approved Geeky Goodness” Patent Pending

_TheIfeelLikeSantaAdmiN_

So the guys over at TheJoyOfTech have come up with this hilarious campaign as to why Leopard has been flying off the shelves… (Click the image for a larger view)

_TheLaughingAdmiN_

So there we were on the scene the other night. AtA chilling with Philips as they were showing Fuji Film’s new Z10fd cameras on their beautiful Ambilight flat panel displays. Because the new camera’s line has so many vibrant colors it was a really good fit with the Ambilight.

Why do I feel like I’m stuck in a commercial? Oh wait – I don’t get paid…

We were impressed by both the cameras blog mode(Multiple picture size outputs) and Quick (3mbps) IR transfer. An open bar and good finger food made sure everyone was having a good time. Maybe too good of a time for some of the execs looking as whacked out as they did.

It’s ok – not like we are going to go and tell the whole world. Oh wait.

But anyway, the entertainment was cool and we didn’t get to stay for the whole time but the audience was having a good time snapping away. Check out some of our blog mode shots…

That’s me

That’s the IR Mode

It seems this little 7 mega pixel brightly colored camera can output blog size optimized pics, so yours truly doesn’t have to re-size in Photoshop or Gimp. That’s a plus, and it can transfer pics from one z10 camera to another via a sweet little infra-red port on it’s side. Check out our willing recipients:

We absolutely fell in love with the eye candy Ambilight effects on the new flat panels. The colors on these new TV’s were great and looked ultra realistic – then they showed us the color picking menu and how realistic it actually gets…

You pick which setting you prefer – realistic or vibrant.

That’s the Ambilight doing its thing with a purpleish color to match FujiFilm’s logo.

We had seen Ambilight several times before on older equipment. It was always a separate unit and it really didn’t do much – but whoa boy did Philips switch it up this time around. With the beautiful 42 incher we were looking at changing Ambilight colors (LED!) depending on what is going on in your programing. Think about it like this: If there are lights behind the television simulating natural light while you are in a dark room your eyes don’t have to adjust and work. That’s awesome! Now we can watch 20 hours of The Simpsons Educational Programing without the eye fatigue… Sweet. Don’t hold me to this but I believe the 42 inch was around 1500… Let me check and get back to you on that.

Enter our Roxio 10 Suite (Sweeet!) Give-a-way Today! Just follow this link and comment!!!

_TheIwantAnewTvAdmiN_

I hate level one tech support with a passion… there has to be some magic words to escalate me to level 3 technical support or @ least to someone who knows what they are talking about!! Anyone know what those magic words are?

Did I mention I was on the phone for 3 hours – Can I send someone a shock through the phone??

_TheIHateTechSupportAdmin_